Diskless Boot Your Computer

If you have a NAS somewhere in your home and it has a wired connection to your primary computer player rig, you may want to try PXE booting. What this means is your operating system for the primary computer player rig is actually stored on the remote NAS, instead of a SSD.

Here is an example where I’m using PXE boot to load Audiophile Linux a while back as a proof of concept (Sorry for the shaking hands).

All you need is a NAS that can provide the following

DHCP Server

TFTP server

Computer rig with a NIC that supports PXE Boot

And away you go!

The instructions for setting this up is readily available on the Internet so I don’t feel the need to regurgitate them here. But really I don’t want to is because I’m thinking creating a new distro that will do this directly. So you immediately get the benefits of a diskless boot setup, without actually knowing how it’s done. In the future Snakeoil will be split into two forms:

Snakeoil. This will be the existing version of Snakeoil Operating System where you install the OS directly to a local HDD/SSD on your computer player rig.

Snakeoil Server. This will be a new version of Snakeoil Operating System where you installt he OS directly on a computer, and it becomes a simple NAS for you to use in your home. All you need to do with your computer rig is to go into the BIOS and (1) Enable PXE booting, and (2) remove all physical disks inside.

And that’s it! As for improvements in sound quality, there actually isn’t any, none that I can spot easily anyway. The advantage of this method is you can quickly try and test different motherboards without actually opening up the case and swap out the operating system SSD. For now I’m targeting the Snakeoil Server to work with the HP Microserver G8.

About The Author

Founder and lead architect of Snakeoil OS - the ultimate audiophile operating system for music playback. My primary focus is in applying technology without losing the human touch.